GIPHY update brings back simple image sharing to Hangouts and other apps

I'm a girl who uses a fair amount of gifs. I'm not ashamed to admit that my personal collection of gifs holds hundreds of moving images, most of them Disney of course. While I was a relative late-comer to using GIPHY over my own collection, I can't deny the app made things so incredible easy when it had what I was looking for. That convenience took a hit last week when an update changed how GIPHY behaved when you hit the green messaging button.

Before, you'd hit that button and would get the Android share menu, complete with a list of suggested contacts to whom you might want to share the link. Now, when you hit that button and would be shown a list of contacts and threads in your default text messaging app. This relegated most users to either sending links to the images through the regular share button in GIPHY or long-pressing an image to save locally and digging out that local copy in Recents to share.

This, understandably, made a lot of users upset because they couldn't easily share gifs to any non-listed messaging platform. So, this morning, GIPHY pushed an update with a one-line changelog: Hangouts issue has been fixed! What they don't mention is how they fixed it, because the green button we're used to using still brings up your dedicated text messaging app.

Instead of reverting the changes on the green messaging button, GIPHY decided to change how the share button behaves. Rather than sending a link when you use the Share button, you share the image. If you still want to send a link, you can copy a link using the chain icon next to the share icon and paste it into your app of choice.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some happy gifs that aren't going to share themselves...